


what bodies know

by knockforaloop (tiac), tiac



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Cunnilingus, Dubious Consent, F/F, Harrow the Ninth Spoilers, Light BDSM, Missing Scene, POV Second Person, Threesome - F/F/F, Vaginal Fingering, is it a threesome though really, is it light though really, pillow queen ianthe, takes place after chapter 29, your sister Lyctor with whom you had a very complex power dynamic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-26
Updated: 2021-01-26
Packaged: 2021-03-17 13:35:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28975230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tiac/pseuds/knockforaloop, https://archiveofourown.org/users/tiac/pseuds/tiac
Summary: The Body did not smile as she directed you, like a dance instructor, how to touch Ianthe and where.An imaginary girl tops an insane girl tops Ianthe Tridentarius.
Relationships: Harrowhark Nonagesimus/Ianthe Tridentarius, The Body | Alecto | The Girl in the Tomb/Harrowhark Nonagesimus, The Body | Alecto | The Girl in the Tomb/Harrowhark Nonagesimus/Ianthe Tridentarius
Comments: 18
Kudos: 42





	what bodies know

**Author's Note:**

> Please see end notes for expanded dubcon rating.

"Wake up, Harrow." The voice was gravel and flute, a fishhook that yanked you out of half-sleep. 

In that artificial dimness, in that too-soft swamplike bed, your body breathed without your direct order. Awake, only your eyes moved-- sweeping the twilit room from its over-plush armchair to the canopy's cobwebby lace. Nothing was out of order in the silent museum of Ianthe's chambers. 

You thought your sister Lyctor was unconscious herself, and closed your eyes, picturing the long hallway you could walk back towards sleep. Then you felt the eiderdown twitch as her weight turned slowly towards you, now half an arm's length away. Tensing like a spring, your legs contracted, ready to kick your way out of the bed.

"Shh," carried softly across the sheets, and then the drowsy inanity, "It's just me." Just as quietly, her chilly concert of phalanx and metacarpal closed around your wrist, as if the pressure of bones you had forged yourself would be less likely to startle you. You did jerk, but your eyes went first off your own side of the bed, where the Body in her Canaanite robe stood where a moment ago had been only air. 

Her stance was neutral and her hands empty, but she sat on the edge of the bed and whispered, "Touch her, Harrow. Do it before she does it to you."

To your half-dreaming brain, this was a snake among weeds, freezing you utterly. Touch her? Ianthe was already holding onto you, now stroking your forearm with the narrow point of one gold-plated fingertip. The Body held your gaze for another long moment, her amber eyes reflecting light that did not exist. Then your coiled tension sprung. You gathered the coverlet between your ankles and twisted it off the bed. This drew a startled noise from Ianthe, who hardened her grasp enough to indent. You rolled over this ignominious tangle of flesh and gilded bone, flipping into the space between her arm and her body and trapping her now under your own weight. 

In the darkness, you had just an instant to take in her wide heliotrope eyes, stale breath. You had landed in the crook of her arm, with one hand free, which-- so obedient, so literal-- you now reached up to place a single fingertip on the high point of her cheekbone, fleshy pad barely at rest on fleshy pad. Ianthe's parted lips began to smile. 

"Sit up," said the Body. "Face her." 

You curled your legs again and knelt up over Ianthe, one thigh between each of yours. Reaction time was key, you saw that now. She stayed unmoving for another beat, then twisted to snap on the tableside lamp, buttery pool of light reviving the yellow circus of her bedding. "Let's see this properly," she said in a coquettish tone, voice fully awake. As she shifted back her nearly white hair spread across the satin pillows. Her eyes were bluer now, observing you observing her. 

The Body did not smile as she directed you, like a dance instructor, how to touch Ianthe and where, but she placed a steady hand at the necklet of your exoskeleton, where you imagined you could feel the cool sacred pressure of her palm through the layers of bone. "Back to her face, draw a line with your finger." You traveled down Ianthe's jawline to her neck; the glistening nerves of her spinal column flared into your focus as sparks that scuttled from your touch. "Trace around her ear, lightly. Good, Harrow. Now, wait for her." 

You sat back on your heels, a pawn willing to be moved and mute. Ianthe's mouth twitched, clearly thinking through her options for repartee. You watched her throat move and her brow tighten as the moment expanded. Finally, she offered an arch, "So, if it's your first time--"

"Remove her shirt-- yes." You moved at the same moment that the Body spoke. Ianthe's throat relaxed as your hands lifted orange ruffles off one shoulder then the next, touching briefly each acromion, then drawing her nightgown open from neck to belly. Warmth rose through her pale body like hot water filling a cup, a blotchy flush that spread from chest to cheeks. You lay a finger flat on her sternum, and her thoracic spine shuffled into your mind in obedient order. A close harmony of rib bones holding their tender organs in choral unison, the diaphragm a modest curtain hiding the cavity of her abdomen. Your mouth felt heavy.

She tapped your exoskeleton on the top of a ridge near your shoulder, mirroring your gesture. "Will this come off?" You stared back at her, unblinking, by way of a response. "Fine," she said, "don't let it tear the sheets," and re-plumped the pillow under her neck. (This was nonsense as the satin weight had already lasted millennia.) Ianthe's nipples were the color of diluted blood, but you ignored them to stroke parallel lines of goosebumps down her ribcage, lightly scoring it with your nails to see that blancmange skin roughen into ridges of dark and light. 

"Here," she said, placing your hand back on her sternum and spreading your fingers so that they fanned across her narrow clavicles and the warmer tops of her breasts. You glanced at the Body, who lifted an eyebrow. Experimentally, you dug your thumbnail into the soft skin of her chest, sensing the gleaming white fascia cradling the muscles above her ribcage. Your own heartbeat was a distant kettledrum. Ianthe's smile flickered. 

"Trust the bone nun to hesitate over a beating heart. But if you're looking for what's locked away..." She pulled up the skirt of her nightgown, pooling its amber fabric on her belly, and smirked down at the spot where your thighs trapped hers. 

You shuffled back, freeing her knees. Your own nightgown skimmed the sheets, a hideous froth of yellow on gold. "Open her legs," the Body ordered. You ran gentle hands down the outsides of Ianthe's pale quadriceps and paused with a thumb on the inside of each knee, waiting. 

"Oh, do go on," said Ianthe. "My breath is bated." But her thighs jumped then stuttered apart as you brushed along her gracilis, coming to rest between her legs, and inclined your focus down. 

Ianthe's thighs were warm from the sheets, still faintly patterned by the fabric that had constricted them. She posed them open for you: you saw the thatch of dense curls, darker than the strands on her head. The brief, coarse hairs along her shins, her unlovely feet. The curved flesh of her narrow fundament. It was your first time with this intimacy, and that registered distantly as wrong somehow-- a stone dropped into a well with a strange echo. Your throat was trembling. You glanced again to the Body, who inched closer and gentled you with a touch; her fingertips swept up your tense live-wire spine, landing gently on your skull. The dead hand cradled the back of your head, and stroked for a moment the hair along your neck. Then it lay heavy and flat across your occipital, and pushed you down. 

"Spread it open with your hand," she said, in her grating mellifluous voice. "Lick her. Push your face in." When your lips made contact with Ianthe's hot damp skin, you lost breath for an instant, eyes closed, shocked by the supernova flare of the nerve endings rushing into your vision, thousands of points of light flickering under your touch.

That cool, strong hand petted your neck, gently tugging and twisting the damp locks at the base of your skull, as you worked a finger in-- through the tight opening of her pubis, then pressure released, the dark and thrumming inside of Ianthe. Astonishment, a body's liquid heat. You barely heard the Body say, "Press up, Harrow. That's it," and moved on your own pure instinct, twisting your wrist to curl a finger towards the incandescent crest of light, the thousand nerves that sang under your weight. Your fingertip stroked spongy ridges, making Ianthe groan and buck beneath your face. The smell filled you. The Body tugged your hair again, more sharply, and you groaned too, mouth still locked to Ianthe, which set her off again. 

Ianthe flapped an arm towards the hand that still supported your weight on the garish bed. For an awful moment it seemed that she might start interlacing your fingers, but she bit out, "Harry, pinch me, I need--" and dragged your hand to rest on her hip. Her iliac crest glowed into shape in your mind: proud sail of bone, a handle to steer. You gripped her like a weapon, nails denting her pale skin, raising crescents that rippled and vanished as soon as they appeared. 

She whined, "Please, harder, fuck," and the Body patted approval on your occipital. You got lost in the rhythm, hand working inside her, face tipped down to suck and flick her hot and fragrant flesh. Breath smashed out of you in uneven drumbeats, heart pounding in your eardrum, hitched to the wash and ebb of a very far-away salty sea. 

In time with the tide, Ianthe's noises sharpened into little shrieks, then a strangled yell. Hips rising off the bed, her body clenched around your finger. She scraped the top of your scalp with her clawed fingers, then started to quietly laugh, petting your temples. Your hot forehead found a home on the pillow of her thigh. 

"Up, now," the Body said, her tone as gentle and as strange as ever. "You're almost done." And you hauled yourself again out of rest. 

When you sat back up on your knees, the Body faced you with the same flat, kind expression as ever, though her yellow eyes yet rang an urgent bell of warning somewhere in your hindbrain. You wanted so badly to ease that warning, to still it with your palms. You swallowed and lay your hands on your thighs: used weapons at rest. The familiar scent of Ianthe's room clung around you, intensified by what you'd done. Sweat, musk, dry grass, old apples. The lamplight seemed very bright now. You found Ianthe's gaze again, eyes stinging. 

"Well, Harry," Ianthe said with a mouthful of cream, "where'd you learn how to do that? Looks like the crypt of the Ninth wasn't as cold as I thought." She wiggled to the side and patted the sheet next to her-- still warm from her body, darkened with sweat where her lower back had rested. Somehow this invitation shocked you more than anything else that had just transpired. 

Your feet found the floor. Your sword was in the Body's hands, tilting into your grasp then your exoskeleton as if it had never left. In your prim cutting voice, hoarse as if with sleep, you said, "No, thank you. My affections lie still in the Locked Tomb." Feeling your eyes fill, you put your clean hand to your face and found the liquid trickling onto your lips was clear; not blood, though just as salty. 

The Body stood too, and touched your shoulder lightly. She walked ahead of you towards the door from Ianthe's room, which unlocked as you followed, and was gone before you made it to the hallway.

**Author's Note:**

> Expanded content notes for dubcon rating: this piece depicts sex between two or three people, each of whom is hiding information from the other(s) that might have made the other(s) not consent to sex. It's just a sexy fucked-up fantasy, don't do this at home. 
> 
> \- Ianthe knows that Harrow has lost Gideon. She doesn't know that the Body is present.  
> \- Harrow knows that the Body is present and giving her directions. She doesn't know that she has lost Gideon.  
> \- The Body knows that Harrow will do anything she says, no matter how unsafe. She has some agenda that none of us know, that makes her manipulate Harrow into sex with Ianthe. 
> 
> I'm feeling that "my search history looks like i'm a terrorist, but i swear it's just research for fiction" meme, except my search history looks like I'm cramming for an anatomy exam. Thanks Tamsyn for making me learn how the spinal column works. I also want to acknowledge [@liveonthesun](https://archiveofourown.org/users/liveonthesun/)'s story [allowed](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25776556) which was influential to my premise-- go check it out! Finally, many thanks to [@rillarev](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rillarev/) for an exceptionally smart and sensitive beta reading. <3
> 
> ALSO, this took a ridiculous amount of textual study to figure out things like exactly what color everything is in Ianthe's room, etc. 
> 
> me: feel free to thank me for my hours of research/procrastination.  
> my HTN ebook: Thank you? tiac, you _loved_ that.
> 
> I'm [@knockforaloop](https://twitter.com/knockforaloop/) on twitter and I'm here to make friends, please come tell me what YOU think the Body's agenda is.


End file.
